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Recently, The New York Timesreported on RoomSync, a Facebook app that colleges can use to allow incoming freshmen to screen and choose potential roommates based on lifestyle criteria that matter to them. On the surface, it sounds like an efficient way to prevent headaches for student affairs staff when roommate situations go awry and one or both parties start agitating for a swap. One of the key values of higher education, however, is the socialization that it provides. Not only are you exposing yourself to new subject areas that weren't offered in high school, you're exposed to other students from across the country and the world who bring radically different experiences to classroom and cafeteria discussions. Figuring out how to process these perspectives, getting along and collaborating with people you'd never choose (or have the opportunity to choose) as friends or teammates or roommates makes you a more well-rounded and less insulated person and gives you the diplomacy skills you need to succeed in the work world. As the NYT piece puts it, "After all, a musician as a roommate might extend a rugby player’s social and cultural life, or vice versa." Allowing students to choose roommates tailored to their specific personal preferences can short circuit this social learning in favor of students opting to remain in their own experiential bubble.

You can argue that this is nothing new and that birds of a feather have always flocked together (it’s called homophily), but previously we had to go looking for like minds in the wild and interact with and evaluate good fits from poor ones manually. Access to demographic and psychographic data at our fingertips has disrupted and expedited that process.

Move In Day 2012 (Photo credit: NazarethCollege)

Imagine a world where after graduating from a college experience in which you were able to limit your daily exposure to those unlike you, you're counseled to wait for a first job that's the perfect fit for your education and ambitions instead of diving in and making the best of the opportunities you find. While the workplace equivalent of RoomSync doesn't exist yet, TalentTribe, which plans to launch in 2015, aims to disrupt the recruitment space by allowing job seekers to filter opportunities based on metrics of cultural fit with a given employer. And, even now, you can use a site like Glassdoor to read user reviews (ostensibly from current or past employees) of given employers to narrow your job search to those that offer the kind of work environment that fits your preferences. Gone are the days of applying blind or relying on public reputation or nuggets of gossip from your LinkedIn network.

After you've secured that dream job (including a pet-friendly office, unlimited vacation time and the most attractive colleagues, if that’s your preference), it's time to start thinking about where you call home. Yet again, big data is there to help you. Goodbye gentrification and hello customization . As the NYT reports, platforms and consulting firms are springing up that allow you to identify neighborhoods based on residents' education level, household income, racial makeup and a host of other characteristics that go beyond simply settling somewhere with low property taxes and good public schools. As Lisa Prevost writes in the piece:

“Want to find a ‘family-friendly’ community within 20 miles of Boston with a high Asian population, a low poverty rate and a median home value of $400,000? On NeighborhoodScout.com, you can plug in these preferences (and many more) on the subscription-only ‘Advanced Search’ page and get a ranked list of options. Or say you’re concerned about winding up a few doors from a sex offender. Type in the address of the property you’re considering on Homefacts.com, and up will pop local specifics, the first of which is the number of registered offenders nearby. What if you’re curious about a neighborhood’s crime rate? On Trulia.com, you can pull up a heat map that shows the level of crime risk down to the street level.”

Research from Notre Dame provides a clue. In a recent piece published by the American Sociological Review, Rory McVeigh and his team found that residential segregation by education level affects perceptions on economic redistribution and provides a context that fosters conservative political mobilization. Investigating the rise of the Tea Party, McVeigh postulates that residential segregation of the college-educated reduces their exposure to those without a college education and that those with college educations often benefit from higher income opportunities, with both conditions affecting their attitude toward income redistribution. When you live in a place where you and your neighbors all have degrees and those degrees have paved the way to high salaries, you’re not likely to be overly concerned with income inequality at a broader, society-wide level and may even oppose government intervention in this area, or so the hypothesis goes. Indeed, McVeigh and fellow researchers found that counties with the highest levels of educational segregation were hotbeds of Tea Party activity. They conclude:

“55.8% of Tea Party organizations in our dataset are located in counties falling into the highest quartile on the measure of educational segregation, and 79.1% can be found in counties in the top two quartiles on the measure. After controlling for numerous other attributes of U.S. counties, we still find a strong, statistically significant relationship between educational segregation and formation of Tea Party organizations.”

It’s a bridge too far to argue that there’s a direct line between a roommate matching app and the rise of special interest politics, but it’s not a stretch to claim that our access to big data enables us to practice an unprecedented level of social segregation in our daily lives and that that isn't without consequences both large and small. And it’s even less of a stretch to assert that this newfound ability to hack our social circles, our work environments and our neighborhoods leaves us insulated, less empathetic, and, well, more boring as individuals.